My Creative Mornings talk

I gave a short talk last month at the Dublin chapter of Creative Mornings.


The given theme was Curiosity, so I just talked about a grab-bag of vaguely design-ey things:

  • The joys of discovering the early web as a teenager. The cyberpunk Wunderkammer that was the wild, DIY, zine-like mid-90’s internet was, to me, the greatest object of curiosity I’d ever encountered.
  • How much the internet has changed since, much of it becoming centrailsed, commodified, and a battleground for our attention. Which is exhausting. Curisoity on the internet today is liability, and can even leave you feeling distracted and overloaded.
  • Some thoughts on observing my own two children’s innate curiousity, along with my wife’s work as an early years art educator. Through them I’ve gotten get a sense of how powerful curiosity-driven learning can be.
  • How Taylorism influenced both workplaces and schools throughout the 20th century, and why the move away from that model to more self-led working and learning remains so hard, even for self-proclaimed “knowledge workers”.
  • How most design leaders (me included!) make the early mistake of thinking their job is to define some magical “design process” for their teams, even though all process is in fact doomed to failure.
  • “Design Leadership as a subversive activity”: why the real job of design leaders (and teachers for that matter) is actually to be a learner.

It’s hard to talk about curiosity and stick to just one topic!

Maybe none of that makes sense in isolation, but if it’s piqued your, y’know… then check out the video. Thanks to Aiden and the crew at CreativeMornings/DUB for having me!

— 04 Mar 2018